Starting Off

We were better off in Russia because we had job, we had this, we had that, but when we got here we had to start from zero. (Claudina Carlos)

My mother arrived in the United States in early 1996.  My father decided to follow her here, and he arrived before the end of the year.

Upon arriving in the United States, my father asked my mother to marry him.  Looking back, both of my parents look back on the proposal of marriage very casually, very much akin to a mutual decision (in her interview, my mom stated, “We decided to get married”).  My father said he “didn’t even have money for [an] engagement ring.”  They have no pictures from their wedding, which further confirms that their marriage was, while definitely one of companionship and love, perhaps out of convenience as they were both new immigrants.

They bounced from apartment to apartment when starting out, and my father mentioned that, at one point, they shared a one-bedroom apartment with six other people.  However, they did find work, both in housekeeping, so they stayed afloat.

I was born in 1997, very shortly after they had arrived in the States.  When I asked my parents in each of their interviews when they felt that they were ready to have children, each of them replied with the fact that they did not plan either me or my sister.  While they did not exactly plan the pregnancies, they did not actively avoid them, either.  While this is typical of lower-income families, my parents also attributed their lack of planning to their Christian faith, saying that, “whatever God gives us, we’ll take.”

When I was a few months old, our small family moved into our own apartment, the apartment I would live in until I was about seven years old.  Both of my parents said that we “started from nothing.”  My father said that, “we moved into the apartment with just our clothes,” lacking basic household items such as beds and dishes.  My mom even went so far to say that they were “better off in Russia.”

You remember, anak, we first moved in to an apartment when you were like probably a couple of months old. We didn’t have anything. We didn’t even have beds. We didn’t have anything. We didn’t have furniture. We just moved to the apartment with our clothes, and that’s about it. No furniture, no dishes, nothing. (Froilan Carlos)

Finding Stability

However, my parents both say that they started accumulating things once I was born.  We were given our neighbor’s old van a few months into my life, and my parents’ jobs became more stable, as my mother started working in two to three different households and my father started his work as an electrician.  When I was seven years old, my parents bought our current house in a town in Maryland called Silver Spring.  My sister was born about two years after that, in a much more financially stable home.